The other day, August 5th to be exact, I had some stalkers — I mean “visitors” — from Australia come over. Their names were Steven (hat), Zach (plaid), Lauren (dress), and Henry (white shirt). Their names are so boring! I thought coming from Australia, which is like all the way around the world and on the bottom to boot, they would have cool Australian names like Kookaburra, Nightshade, and System Failure. Those sound like good Australian names to me! Lauren was their Uber driver so she’s an American from Austin. Still, she could have a name like Cylinder. Wouldn’t that be fun. Short for Master Cylinder. But no, they had regular American names.

If you have been following my exploits (and I think you’d better have a darned good excuse if you haven’t been), then you know that I recently went to the small animal clinic at Texas A&M University (TAMU) in College Station, Texas to have some abscesses removed. Just to refresh your memory, Melly blogged about it here. After ten days, I was supposed to have my stitches taken out. Considering how stressful the drive was for me and the fact that Dr. Hoppes and her team had to come to Austin to take care of a zoo lion anyway, we all decided a house call was in order.

As a capybara, it is my job to brighten people’s lives. As a scardy-bara, this is much more difficult for me than it was for Caplin Rous. Caplin could go out in public and meet hundreds of people in one day. Not me, if people want to meet me they have to come to my house and see me on my own territory. Melly says someday I might get brave enough to go out someplace but I don’t see it happening.